is dovetail ready for production use?

[Vineet Gupta]

Is dovetail ready for production usage?

What kind of load can it take from an application?

How big can a database be?

[psch...@gmail.com]

At this stage, DovetailDB is certainly alpha software, and not
suitable for production use. However, the product is nearly feature-
wise complete, which leads me to believe that we could reach a 1.0
release in only a few more iterations for stabilization.

I hope to post some hard performance numbers on the site this week,
but some characteristics from my casual observations so far:

I've created databases with as much as one million reasonably-sized
records (> 1GB on disk) without breaking anything (there is no
theoretical maximum on the data store size).
The storage required on-disk is generally less than 2X the size of the
objects in JSON (this overhead is for the transparent indexing).

Even in the largest databases, equality constraint queries are fast --
generally in the tens of milliseconds range (server-side time). Range
queries and sorts need some optimizations for large datasets; I've got
some enhancements planned for this, also hopefully in the next week or
so. DovetailDB should be able to effectively employ several
processing cores.

For bulk loading, you should write a server-side Javascript procedure
to insert blocks of objects under a single transaction -- when doing
this, you should be able to insert several hundreds of objects per
second.

Transparent data sharding and synchronous replication will also likely
be released in the next week or two, which should allow for truly
massive databases.